Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (15 page)

An elderly man spoke up about a young woman killed by a drunken driver two nights before out near Bell's Pond. Orville had seen the mangled body, pronounced her dead. The man told the victim's story. She'd led an exemplary life of service, doing Quaker missions for peace in Central America in the Witness for Peace program, protesting President Ronald Reagan in his first six months in office in 1981 using the CIA to secretly assassinate, via an exploding helicopter, the elected president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldós, and two months later, in an exploding light plane, the elected president of Panama, Omar Torrijos, and ever since then to secretly run the Contra war in Nicaragua. After Nixon and 'Nam, Orville thought it couldn't get worse. But now, in what was happening and the slick denial that it was happening at all, it was starting to.

A woman spoke of organizing a nonviolent local protest against the president's building five thousand new nuclear bombs and basing new “Peacekeeper” missiles in Europe.

More silence. They left early, leaving the others sitting there. Out on the street again, Miranda and Orville now felt not only shy but gloomy. So far the day was a dud. Together they faced but one question: Now what?

“How was that for you?” she asked in order to say
something.

“
Busy mind, going
flit flit flit flit help!
I've had better meditations.
”

“You meditate?”

“I did. Not much since I've been back. I did in Italy.”

“What was her name?”

Orville was startled. “Celestina Polo.”

Miranda heard in the way he said it his love for her. She thought, Okay, lady, you and he are nothing—be generous. “As my son would say, ‘Awesome name.'”

“Used to be. It's over. Thanks to my mother and Columbia.”

“How's that?”

He told her about the terms of the will and of Celestina's stalling and then dumping him for a Swiss banker. He didn't mention Selma's letters or her flying around or the Worth's seeming to plead with him.

And then a funny thing happened. Something about how she was looking at him, with such attentive curiosity, set him off. He told her about the hellish time he was having being back in town doctoring the Columbians. He talked about guns, about the endless drunken car crashes that left innocent Witnesses for Peace who'd never done anything wrong in their lives in smudges of blood and bone and guts and brain on the pavement, about the alcohol and drugs and muggings and violence as bad as anything he'd seen anywhere, hey maybe even as bad as on TV—and he talked about how everybody seemed to want to deny that it existed.

“I'm the guy at the bad end of it all!” he cried out, standing there on the icy street. “I'm the one they call to sew them up, cast their bones, pronounce them dead. I'm the one called in for a dose of reality and I'm sick of it! Do you know how much effort it takes just to sew up a wound, let alone try to repair a blown-off leg? How many years—hard, disciplined years—it takes to learn it? I put out enormous effort, superhuman effort on a daily basis, and they put out none! The Columbians eat crap and lie around like pigs and smoke so the nicotine makes them feel a little jazzed up while the carcinogenic tars mix with the PCBs from the river and the cement dust to destroy their lungs and livers, and then they say to themselves, ‘Gosh, I think I'll go to the
doctor
!'”

He tried to stop himself but couldn't.

“The irony here is that the Columbians act in what they think is their own self-interest, and wind up doing exactly what will hurt themselves the most! The true Columbian is always shooting himself in the foot. And who's my alderman? Who's gonna probably run for Congress? Henry Schooner—the neo-Nazi of my childhood. I've had it! Columbians, in total selfishness, do the worst things for themselves and I damn well don't want to be the guy that tries to patch 'em up anymore! Breakage! Self-centeredness! Looking Out for Number One! I mean, Jesus Christ, where's the kindness, the compassion for the other guy, Looking Out for Number Two? What about taking care of somebody
else
? Taking care of your neighbor, your town? Me and Bill try to care for bodies and maybe minds, but we're just treating symptoms, not anything that matters, not souls—we're just pissing in the ocean! It can't be just you and Mrs. Tarr, no matter how great a lady she is. God knows it can't be the children, the Amys of the world. I've had it. I've got nine months and change left trying to deal with this human breakage and then I am history! Every day I feel like giving up and running away again and the only good thing I've found here is
you
!”

YOU . . . You . . . youyouuuu echoed between the houses on Coffin.

Miranda felt a kind of
zing
go through her body, leaving her tingling all over, all senses heightened, deepened. For the first time since her husband's death, she knew that a man loved her. He was looking away, embarrassed, as if he felt he'd lost her—at the moment he'd found her! She couldn't speak.

Orville was sure he'd blown it. The silence killed him. He watched a pickup truck approach, on its front bumper a sticker saying
DRIVER
CARRIES NO CASH—HE IS MARRIED
, and on its back bumper
MY CHILD WAS INMATE-OF-THE-MONTH
.

He turned back to Miranda, ready to say good-bye. To his surprise, she was smiling. She seemed to be trying not to laugh.

She
was
trying not to laugh. She said only, “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Yes,
what?
”

“You
got
it. For as long as anyone can remember or kept written records, Columbians have been just as you describe. For two hundred years it's been the most mean-spirited, self-destructive little town that anyone
else
has seen either. It's been
known
for that! I've researched this for my thesis—‘The Columbian Spirit'—and the more I learn, the more I feel like, at this moment, the way you look.” She stared at him—standing there with his jaw dropped and eyes wide—and laughed, more freely now. “That look of—what? Incredulity? Disbelief?”

“No, no, no—belief!”

“Exactly! Sometimes I sit there reading the documents and I say, ‘Oh my God, they didn't!' You see, it's hor—” She couldn't suppress her laughter. “It's
horrible!
C'mon.” She crooked her arm for him to support. He took it.

She drove them up Washington and then north on Fourth to the Columbia Area Library, a two-story building made of chiseled limestone blocks all glazed golden in the noon light, with a central Federalist body and two symmetric wings. As they got out and walked toward the entrance, she told him that it had been built in 1818 as an almshouse in tardy and resentful compliance with a state law of 1778 that forced towns to take care of their poor, then in 1830 it became the first insane asylum in America, in the Quaker tradition of trying to be humane with the lunatics. Next, when the State Asylum in Utica opened in 1850, it was refurbished as the Columbia Female Academy, where the great painter Henry Ary taught young ladies art, and then—as Orville must have known from his childhood—it became an orphanage.

“The Orphanage,” he said, looking at it afresh. “I remember. Ominous, back then.”

He helped her up the granite steps to the door guarded by two stone lions—miniatures, it seemed to him, of the two grand lions in front of the New York Public Library, the meeting point for him and his ex-wife, Lily, whenever they were in the City.

Miranda took out a key and unlocked the door and flicked on the lights. She led him upstairs to a tiny room labeled “
Archives,”
its tables covered with notes and typed manuscripts.

“This is where I work,” she said. “Have a seat.” He faced her across the table.

She told him that the early history of the Dutch and the Indians was full of folly. A ferry built at the exact spot on the east bank of the Hudson that guaranteed that its most direct route west across the river would be blocked by an island, Middleground Flats. A waterwheel at Kleek's Pond for grinding grain, fed by a stream that, in the dry months of the harvest, was too enfeebled to turn it. A bigger waterwheel at the same stream, which worked worse. Von Hogeboom's Giant Windmill, for grinding grain, built on the highest point of Cemetery Hill, caught the wind beautifully but was so high up that few wagon teams could reach it. But, she pointed out, such follies were not uncommon in such towns at such times. The New World, after all, was learning. The unique Columbian spirit was something else: a comic genius for self-destruction.

“We left off in 1803,” Miranda said cheerfully. “The religious utopia of the Quakers is coexisting nervously with the sexual circus of the whores. Things don't go well. By 1837 the town is broke. Asked to increase their tax payments, Columbians refuse. Instead, the town sells off all the land encircling it to the hamlet of Spook Rock. This ensures that, forever after, the town will
always
be broke—its tax base is capped.”

“Columbians strangled Columbia?”

“Good phrase—I'll use it. Soon Columbia becomes known as ‘a finished city.' Ignatius Jones, a native son returning home in 1847, writes a memoir—
Whither Columbia?
” She opened a book and read. “‘An all-pervading air of listless indolence, and a Sabbath-like stillness, hung like a pall over what I remembered as busy, lively, bustling streets. Columbians are reluctant to risk one farthing for the common good.'” She closed the book and went on. “In 1859 oil is discovered by a wildcatter in Titusville, Pennsylvania—soon making whale oil worthless. The Quakers begin to leave. The remaining Columbians are offered money by the railroad to lay tracks across the two deepwater bays, which will destroy forever the possibility of Columbia being a port. They take the money. The bays turn into swamps, breeding pestilential insects. By the end of the Civil War the Quakers are gone, leaving the utopia in the hands of the whores and gamblers. In 1866 fires destroy much of Washington Street. Columbians are asked to finance a bond to buy a steam fire engine to replace a hand-operated pump. They vote ‘No.' 1867 sees the town spending less than a third of what any other town its size in the state spends on itself. In 1876 there are schools enough for only half the children, which leads to truancy and crime, and when Columbians are asked to approve a bond issue for more schools and teachers, they vote ‘No.' Columbia is the last town in the state to have a board of education or a public library. I mean, Andrew Carnegie was
giving
away money to every town in America to build libraries in the early 1900s. Even we, in tiny Boca Grande, Florida, population ninety-three, took the cash and built a library. Columbians were offered the money and voted ‘No.' You know when this place became a library?”

“I never thought about it. Maybe when I was in high school?”

“In 1961! Last in the state. Dead last.” She shook her head in puzzlement. “But the most amazing thing, I think, is the Columbian attitude toward light. I've really gotten into light.”

“Tell me.”

“Since 1797 there are gas streetlamps. But Columbians don't want to spend the money to keep them lit. They're only lit on nights when
The Farmer's Almanac
predicts there won't be much moonlight—sixteen nights a month, six hours a night. Never mind that even on the nights of moonlight there might be clouds or rain or snow. No light. By 1855 the town runs out of money again and shuts off the gas in the lamps. Columbians are outraged. Until they are asked for a special tax levy, at which point they say No. The streets stay dark. Gangs of young hooligans roam at night. Fires get harder to fight.” She paused and winked. “But all is not lost. Finally, Columbians rally!”

“Thank God.”

“They send out a call for more police and fire.”

“As they should.”

“The town council responds.”

“We're saved!”

“They propose a small tax raise to pay for more police and fire.”

“Who wouldn't pay for that?” Orville asked. “Why, no one wouldn't, no one wouldn't at all!”

“And what do the Columbians vote?” Miranda asked.

“Why, finally they break their streak and vote ‘Yes'!”

She smiled and shook her head.

Together, they said, “They vote ‘No'!”

They chuckled, and Miranda went on, “Columbia remains the most poorly lighted town on the Hudson—maybe in America, perhaps in the civilized world.”

“And so when my fellow Columbians are given the choice between whether it's better to light just that one little candle or live in the dark?”

“They choose the dark. The only light is on Diamond Street, in the whorehouses. When the Quakers leave, Columbia becomes a boomtown in whores.”

“From Whales to Whores: An American Story.”

“But in 1953 Governor Dewey shuts Diamond Street down. Thirty years ago now, Columbia loses its last glitter. It goes dark. The same town that in 1790-something missed by one vote being named the capital of New York State is now dead.” She looked at him curiously. “Were you born here?”

“No.”

“When did you come here?”

“In 1946.”

“Oh. I see.” To him, her expression seemed like what you see at a funeral.

“Why?”

“Of all the bad periods of this town's self-destructive history, you might have chosen the very worst.”

“Great,” he said in mock appreciation. “You know, I remember Diamond Street. At night it
was
all lit up. We'd see fancy cars, license plates from Massachusetts, New Jersey—even Canada. Music floated out of the open windows. Women were all dressed up—men, too. Bill Starbuck was their doc. He told me about it. ‘Two dollars for a house call,' he'd say, ‘or I'd take it in kind. Never came outta there empty-handed.'”